Damn

Rest in peace Hiker. Thank you for giving me the time of my life here at Runevillage.

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GF to my imageshack based sig.

Thought for sure by now something would have been dug up.

Hiker went out the way I was always terrified of: Being completely forgotten after death. It looks like he didn't have much left in the way of living family members (and I'm sure they weren't very close to him. I know my family members were pretty distant with a similar person in my family.) and the only friends he had were online.

As disgusted as I was by the things he did and the utilization of donations... it's really depressing to realize that he likely just got picked up and put in the ground one day after his bills were so overdue that someone finally came to check in on him.

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It's tough, but I still play. I keep losing, but I still play! - Taichi
Digital Complex is officially launched!

He was a good man and was a large part of many of our childhoods, in a non-sexual way of course!

I'm surprised this forum is even still up... Maybe it is time to put down old-yeller.

Not going to lie. I saw the PM and I felt the loss. I may not have known Hiker but I still saw him as a leader of the site. I'm sorry for his loss. Shame on people who use a thread to pay homage for slamming him.

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R.I.P. to Hiker the personality.

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Live forever.
Live free.

He was getting old and spent most of his life severely overweight. I would imagine he died of a heart attack.

It's amazing how hard it is to find a record of his death.

This is why I'm having trouble believing that Hiker has actually passed on. There's nothing to say he died except one website. Unless there are laws about pedophiles not being recognized in obituaries or something?

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I don't think there's a law about that. However, I also don't think he had anyone close enough to him left to write one...

Let me throw this out there, though: Once you're on a sex offender registry, you're on there for life--even if you were added accidentally (there are horror stories out there about that kind of thing happening). hiker was marked as deceased on that registry, and now he's been removed from it entirely. I think there's only one way they'd remove him from their list, and that's proof enough for me. =\

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.Legendary themed months are back! Maybe.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I emailed the records dept. at tn.gov and they won't tell me if he died, only that one way to be removed from the list is death. I guess it's safe to assume he passed on. He must have been pretty much alone since there was no obit written.

I am really late to this thread but, yeah. We took him to lunch once before all of that came out about him but we weren't in touch with him other than on here for admin matters, at the time or afterwards.

It's sad to find this out. I hope he finally found peace.

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We do not stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.

i think there's a lot to learn from Hiker, but if you can't see it, you don't deserve to. and that's really all I have to say about it.

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<3 sammich
Visit the RV Chatroom Today! The Coolest Place in RuneVillage!

Well its sad to hear of his passing, tho i never condoned what he did in his past.

He was the creator of this forum and site an for that i am thankful, as i got to meet a lot of cool people and hang out with you lot.

RIP Hiker

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Never argue with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience

Yikes

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Taking a break from school.. so you might see me then i will be gone..again =P

Like all of you, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for him.

Could someone PM me w/r/t all of the controversy with hiker though? I have no idea what it is...

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Ooh ooh ah ah!

RIP.

-Phat

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PoopbaLL`

That's certainly true in at least one very narrow context: one big mistake is all it takes to ruin your life. If it's big enough it can come back to haunt you decades later, and cause people who once adored you to hate you in an instant.

Fortunately there are very few things in the world of that magnitude.



Tl;dr: We found out this was Hiker's favorite music video... 'cept with boys.



Long story long: while talking to a moderator who was bitching about Hiker back in 2011, I decided to look up Hiker on the sex offender registry for a lark. Turns out a guy named Thomas Watson was actually there. Crosschecked the address on the registry with a letter the moderator had received from him. It was him.

I then went on PACER and downloaded all of the documents relating to his case that were available. Since it was from the early '90s, there wasn't much, but a few had made their way there. I sent then sent them to Jagex under an alias and had Jem post them here, so as not to taint people's opinions of the situation with the fact that I had been permanently banned half a dozen times and was a massive jerk.

Anyway, it turns out Hiker had been caught distributing child pornography, specifically because he sent it to an undercover FBI agent or some dumb thing. By my reading they had him dead to rights; it didn't help that he had bragged to the FBI agent that he had previously molested or raped (I don't recall which) an underage boy on the Appalachian Trail. Brings a whole new meaning to the Hiker moniker, I guess.

He was previously guilty of sexual battery back in the '80s, a plea deal he agreed to after being charged with abducting and forcing some kid to smoke pot. Don't ask me how that one was supposed to work.

Anyway, when all of that was behind him, I guess he moved and didn't register to be a sex offender in Tennessee or something. After RV had been created, the authorities him through his utility bills, and caught him hanging out with this sex offender friend of his.

He got in trouble for that, and "The Big Push" may or may not have been conjured up to help pay the resulting legal bills. He claimed it wasn't, but the timing was pretty conspicuous.

I don't know if they're still around, but there were a couple giant threads about this back in 2011. The moderators moved them to their private forum so that RV could turn over a new leaf after Hiker resigned his position (due to community outrage).

The site is pretty much dead now so it doesn't matter, but the threads were absolutely huge given the activity level of the site at the time. For about a week, the chat room went from having four or five people in it to dozens as members who hadn't been seen for years came out of the woodwork to talk about the scandal.

There was a donation drive, Henner stole all the money, quit, and then the new team took over. But RV was too far gone at this point; it had been on life support for years and the Hiker scandal murdered what little traffic was left, at least according to Jackstick.

This is all from memory. The facts may be slightly different but the core of the story is the same. You can read Hiker's "defense" at the link below. As far as I know, all of the court documents are still on PACER, so if you care to make an account you can read the source material yourself.

http://pastebin.com/7eXUd9vm

So, yeah, that's pretty much it.

Seems like a lot of underlying rage over being banned on an internet forum a couple of times to dob him into Jagex but whatever floats your boat I guess.

I don't think it was ever mentioned in this thread, but I'm betting I'm not alone in entertaining the idea that he may have taken his own life in the end. If hiker had changed from his past, and it's a big if mind you, I can only imagine how his past coming back to ruin his life all over again would have affected him. I guess we'll never know if he really ever changed just like we'll probably never know how or precisely when he died.

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Guild Wars 2

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A couple dozen times is more like it, but yeah. I'm not going to dispute that, though at the time I would have said I thought I was doing the world a favor. The truth is we will usually rationalize any actions we take, whether the rationalization makes sense or not.

Hiker himself was a great example of this.



It has been speculated. No one has put any serious effort into finding out, as far as I know.